Norman Reedus, whom you might know as Daryl from The Walking Dead, is promoting his new show Ride, which premiered on AMC this Sunday. It’s a reality travelogue show where he visits friends and gets into adventures on his motorcycle. I’m a motorcycle rider who started somewhat late in life. The premiere made me want to ride the Pacific Coast Highway, but I’m not sure I’ll continue to watch it. Reedus seems a little stiff and his personality is not drawing me in. The real stars are the people Reedus meets along the way, like the guy who gives tours of Nitt Witt Ridge, the former home of a garbage collector in Cambria, CA who made his residence out of trash, the workers at electric motorcycle company Zero, and the wonderful people from the Motorcycles and Misfits podcast. (I might tune in for Fleet Week!) Reedus’s storyline feels a little forced but the motorcycle enthusiasts are fun to see. One of the workers at Zero even had a tattoo from the Walking Dead comics.
Speaking of the comics, the showrunners have not followed the comics in every case and many of us are still wondering who died at the wrong end of Negan’s bat, Lucille, at the end of the finale this season. It came across as a cheap way to keep fans hanging and many people were upset about it. Well Reedus has an answer to that, and his wording is quite similar to that used by showrunner Greg Nicotero and the actor playing Negan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He tells us to “trust” the producers. It’s almost as if WD stars were given talking points.
Cherry-picked, AMC-approved teases and tidbits fed to online news outlets aren’t enough for the fans who run sites like The Spoiling Dead, a community dedicated in part to crowdsourcing grainy footage of actors on set and deducing what the images mean about which characters live and die.
They’re a formidable force: the site’s 350,000-strong fan base has accurately predicted the deaths of several main characters over the last few seasons, using intel gathered from intrepid, cellphone-wielding fans who convene near set during filming.
And at least one star of the show is openly sick of it.
“When there’s 200 people who’ve all driven [to set] from other parts of the country just to sit there and get a picture of whoever’s there and wreck it for everyone, you’re like, what—what are you guys doing?” says Norman Reedus, who plays fan favorite Daryl Dixon.
“Why? Why? Why do you want to do that? Why do you want to spoil stuff? I like the enthusiasm and stuff but, you know, if I knew what you were gonna get for Christmas…I seriously doubt I’d put it on the internet. I wouldn’t want to wreck that for you.”
“I don’t know, it’s just the world we live in now, where everybody’s got a cell phone and everyone’s on a something-gram or a something-book and everybody wants to know everything right now, right now,” he sighs. “I don’t want to sit down with you at a movie and have the guy next to me tell me the end of the movie as it’s starting, you know what I mean? Everything’s all instant gratification…”
Reedus can only disclose that filming is well underway. And, despite the critical lambasting season six’s cliffhanger finale endured, Reedus insists that the story unfolding will “pay off” in spades at the start of season seven.
“All I can say is it’s worth the wait,” he says. “You just have to trust us. The show’s large and a lot of people like it and it’s done really well. You just gotta trust us that we’re telling a story and you’ll get the answers that you want.”
Most of the fans, including those of us who gossip for a living, aren’t seeking out spoilers. They have more to worry about from celebrity news sites like TMZ. There was a recent car accident in Georgia during which Reedus and another WD actor, presumed to be dead, came to someone’s aid. I’m not going to link it but you may know what I’m referring to. None of this would be happening though if showrunners hadn’t pulled such a cheap stunt. All they had to do was reveal who died and they could have avoided all of this mess. It’s not like people aren’t going to tune in next season.
Photos credit: WENN, FameFlynet and Getty
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